Something Strange Is Forming in Titan's Seas

Saturn's incredible moon is alive.

These three images, created from Cassini Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data, show the appearance and evolution of a mysterious feature in Ligeia Mare, one of the largest hydrocarbon seas on Saturn's moon Titan. (Photo Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASI/Cornell)

This month, two new probes reached the orbit of Mars—one from NASA, and one from India's space agency. But seriously: While exciting new discoveries are bound to come from our robotic Mars explorers, let's get a new explorer to Titan already.

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Titan, Saturn's largest moon, is bigger than the planet Mercury, is the only place in the solar system besides Earth with a thick atmosphere and surface lakes, and is generally a bizarre and tantalizing place. Just take this new set of pictures that NASA released yesterday.

Last summer, NASA's Cassini orbiter (which has been exploring Saturn and its moons since 2004) spotted this strange blob forming in one of Titan's seas. The dark parts of these pictures represent the seas made of hydrocarbons, mostly ethane and methane. The bright areas are the land. And in this series of three images (Click to Enlarge), you can see a finger-like mass of material begin to take shape. In new pics that NASA obtained in August, the blob have doubled in size to about 60 square miles compared the last time Cassini looked at it 11 months prior.

NASA doesn't know just what we're looking at here. It's researchers are investigating a number of possible explanations for the blob, "including surface waves, rising bubbles, floating solids, solids that are suspended just below the surface or perhaps something more exotic."